Long time ago I promised to show LINQ in a demo, instead of just showing slides. Finally it's online :-) So to show you how much easier it is to write code in C# 3.0 than it was in C# 2.0, I've created a small webcast (about 25 minutes).

In the webcast I show a few slides, but most of the time is used in Visual Studio 2008 writing code. In the webcast I create a small program in C# 2.0 and afterwards I convert it to C# 3.0.

I show both LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML. LINQ to DataSets and LINQ to SQL. Of course there are much more in LINQ than I can show in 25 minutes :-) By the way - the webcast and the slides are in Danish.

I've just installed Visual Studio 2008 RTM and opened the project I was working on in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 a few hours ago and what happens?

Of course there are changes in the framework between beta 2 and RTM - but I hate changes in designer generated files. The same thing happened when I moved from beta 1 to beta 2 :-( I think I'll wait till tomorrow trying to figure out what it is Visual Studio 2008 is trying to tell me :-)

Update:
The fix was just to remove the encoding attibute in the XML document description:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>

Let's take a quick overview of my sessions at Tuesday. I started out with part two of Omars session - nothing new, as expected. Afterwards I joined a WF session by Paul Andrew instead of Lucas's LINQ talk. It was definitely the best WF session I've seen so far so now I actually want to find a project where I can use it :-) In the lunch break I heard David Platt's talk Why Software Sucks. David is indeed a funny and bright guy, so if you ever get the chance to listen to his words - dot it :-) My last real session was Next Generation Networking in Windows Vista by Rafal Lukawiecki. I think there was a little too much IPv6 in the talk but Rafal did a very good job in explaining a lot of cool features in Vista networking. This is the 10th year Rafal speaks at TechEd - pretty cool!

Unfortunately I had to skip my last two sessions, as all MSP's had to meet :-( We heard a lot about the MSP program in general and got the opportunity to ask questions to some of the speakers here at TechEd, including Rafal and David. Later we played bowling with the other MSP's, got some tapas and a lot of beers :-)

After the last beer:

Besides the keynote, only two sessions were held Monday. In the first session Omar Khan talked about some of all the new features in Visual Studio 2008. So nothing new there for me, as I've used it for development in both beta 1 (when it was called Orcas) and now I'm using beta 2. I could see that Omar was using a newer version than beta 2, as the Add method on the tables in LINQ to SQL was not called Add but InsertOnSubmit - which is the name of the method post beta 2. The first session for me today, is part two of that session. So I don't expect to see much new there either - but who knows, maybe there are one or more features I've overseen :-)

The last session was Luca Bolognese talking about LINQ in general. As expected the content was exactly the same as at the JAOO conference. So nothing new here either :-( Actually even the jokes were the same, but I still laughed at his "so now I've got ravioli in my XML"-joke. My second session today is Luca talking about LINQ to SQL - but I think I will skip that one, if I can find something new to hear about instead.

After the sessions we took a quick walk around in the exhibition hall. Approximately 4.000 other people were there too, so it was a bit crowded. So instead of getting run down by all these people, we went to a tapas restaurant with Henrik Westergaard Hansen (our former ADE - Academic Software Evangelist), Martin (our new ADE) and a few others. Afterwards we went to a bar... the rest of the evening is pretty easy to guess ;-)

I know the order of my posts may be weird... but that's life too :-) It's just funny how much Henrik W. Hansen can eat... here we are at lunch

After lunch we got some coffee

And only 1½ hours after lunch, Henrik was eating again just before the keynote

Cool, now you can extend World of Warcraft directly from Visual Studio... funny :-)

You probably already knew it - but now it's official. In his keynote Soma Somasegar announced, that Visual Studio 2008 will be available before the end of November - great! :-)

Yesterday Claus, his girlfriend Julia and I arrived to Barcelona. After check-in at the hotel, Claus and I got registered at TechEd (just a few hundred meters from the hotel) - so now we are ready to hear a lot of interesting (new) stuff from Microsoft :-)

We met with Julia's brother, his girlfriend and their daughter who all lives in Barcelona. After seeing their apartment, we went around the city. At the hospital I took 8 pictures, which combined into one in Windows Live Photo Gallery gives this huge photo (I must remember to take more of the sky next time):

After walking around the city we got a little hungry. So at a restaurant I took this picture:

Finally back at the hotel, we went to the bar which was a little boring, as we were the only people down there (probably because of the classical music the bartender loved so much :-( ):

Now I look forward to the first day at TechEd :-)

Yes sir! Tomorrow I'm going to Barcelona to attend the TechEd 2007 conference. Last year I only spend two days at the conference, but this time it's the whole thing - it's going to be tough! The program goes like this:

I especially look forward to hear Luca Bolognese again. I heard his talks about LINQ at JAOO and I must say that I've never seen a speaker like Luca. It's just amazing how fast code is coming out of him while he is speaking. Usually you can speak or you can code - it's hard to do both at the same time. But Luca used code snippets to speed up the coding - so it went really fast but it was still easy to follow him. Cool! The downside of his talks is that there is nothing new in them - I've already seen it all before. Actually two of his three presentations at TechEd are the same as at JAOO (I've cheated and seen his slides already ;-) ). But I still look forward to see him again.

Fortunately the weather forecast for Barcelona is a lot better than what we are used to at this time of year here in Denmark - nice! :-)
 

If you are studying at DAIMI, you probably already know microsoft.daimi.au.dk. What you probably don't know is that the site has been relaunched this weekend. The previous site was both old and static (and not running .NET). The new site is new and dynamic (and running .NET).

On the site we (Microsoft Student Partners at DAIMI) will post info about MSDNAA, competitions, tips and tricks and so on. So if you study at DAIMI go check it out at microsoft.daimi.au.dk.

The winner of the Xbox 360 from last months competition is now found. In less than 5 minutes Henrik Andersen signed up using a webservice and now he got a Xbox 360 - how crazy is that?!?

Do you also want a chance to win? Go to ic.nlbeck.dk and read more about Imagine Cup (in Danish) - actually just by signing up you have the chance to win! So go go go...

Wow... today is my 10.000 days birthday... cool... not sure I can remember each day :-S

I'm attending JAOO 2007. It all starts in 20 minutes, so I better finish my breakfast... but this is my calendar for the following 6 days:

If you are a student at DAIMI and still haven't participated in the "Code for fun and win an Xbox in 5 minutes" competition - you better start coding now!

All you have to do, is to register yourself using the webservice located here: www.paainternettet.dk/studiestart

If you register before the 28th of September 2007, you will participate in a draw of an Xbox 360 and 10 Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 packages. So start coding - NOW!

In the good old days when XP ruled the world, my photo collection was one big mess. I had about 12.000 photos and videos from the past 5 years. They were all in their own folder, named something like 2002-08-20, to indicate that the pictures in that folder were taken the 20th of august 2002. It was actually quite hard to find a particular photo, if I didn't know the exact date it was taken.

Then... da da daaaa... Microsoft released Windows Vista including the brand new Windows Photo Gallery. After a few days many of my photos were tagged, so they were easy to find again. The great thing about tags in Windows Photo Gallery is that it allows you to create a hierarchic tagging structure. The way it is done, is that if I want to tag a picture from Nice in France, I tag it Location/France/Nice. Then in the left side of the program in the Tags category, it will show up with only Location. If I click Place, it will show me France and a click on France will show me Nice. Under Nice I can then see all my photos from Nice. Nice feature :-)

My tag hierarchy consists of three main tags, Event, Location and People. A part of it looks something like this, except it's in danish:

• Event
  • Work
  • Holiday
    • Nice
    • Sunny Beach
  • Party
  • Birthday
    • Brian, 30
    • Lise, 23
    • Lise, 24
    • Niels, 25
    • Niels, 26
    • Niels, 27
  • Nature
    • Flowers
    • Animals
    • Sea
    • Sunset
    • Snow
• People
  • Work
  • Family
    • Lise
    • Hans Harald
    • Niels
  • Old friends
  • University
  • Friends
• Location
  • France
    • Nice
  • Bulgaria
    • Sunny Beach
    • Burgas
  • Monaco
  • Denmark
    • Århus
      • Home
      • Tivoli

With that kind of structure, it's quite easy to find exactly the picture I want to find.

Yesterday Microsoft released a new beta of their Live suite, including Windows Live Photo Gallery beta. And I can tell you it's a great program! I have a bunch of new features, but look like the good old Windows Photo Gallery. I especially like the new panorama feature. Just select two or more photos that are taken of the same thing right click and select Create panoramic photo. Then computer will then work hard for a few seconds to combine the selected photo into one big panoramic photo.

Here you can see 8 pictures from the harbor in Monaco combined to one giant photo and the cropped with the cropping tool in Windows Live Photo Gallery (click the photos to see them in full size - might take a while to load as they are pretty big):

And one more photo, combined of just two photos - still from Monaco:

I just love these features! I'm sure they are useful to you too... so why don't you go download Windows Live Photo Gallery? :-)

I have recently made a small webcast about LINQ. The webcast is in danish, as the target is danish developers and students. In the webcast I talk about the new features in C# 3.0 that makes LINQ possible. So if you want to hear a few danish words about the new keyword var, automatic properties, object/collection initializers, extension methods, lambda expressions, query syntax and anonymous types - watch the webcast.

The webcast can also be found at the front page at msdn.dk.

In the near future I expect to make another webcast where I not only present some PowerPoint slides, but also demonstrates LINQ using the new version of Visual Studio codename Orcas. So stay tuned!

By the way, my profile is now online at msdn.dk - check it out, if you want to hear why I'm a Microsoft Student Partner (also in danish).

A few words in danish (get it as a .pdf):

Er du studerende? Er du interesseret i teknologi? Vil du udvide dit netværk? Udvikler du spændende software? Kan du se mulighederne i nye teknologier? Bruger du tid på at kommunikere din viden videre til andre studerende? Syntes du det er cool at være nørd?

Hvis du svarer ja til flere af disse spørgsmål, så er Microsoft Student Partners måske noget for dig. Microsoft Student Partners er et verdensomspændende netværk af entusiastiske studerende som er passioneret omkring teknologi. Microsoft Student Partners handler om videndeling, samarbejde mellem universiteter samt udforskning af ny Microsoft teknologi.

Der afholdes to netværksmøder om året, hvor alle MSP'er deltager. På netværksmøderne er der fokus på videndeling og networking. Alle MSP'er præsenterer de teknologier som de har syslet med siden sidst. Sidste år deltog alle MSP'er desuden på TechEd i Barcelona, som er en god mulighed for at tilegne sig den sidste nye viden. Det tilstræbes at alle MSP'er deltager på TechEd igen i år.

Typisk afholder hver MSP fire foredrag i løbet af året for studerende/medstuderende/undervisere. Desuden støtter MSP'erne op om de deltagere som der er til Imagine Cup.

I skrivende stund omfatter netværket AAU, AU, DTU, IHA. Tag endelig en snak med de MSP'er der er på dit universitet, hvis du vil høre mere, eller send undertegnede en mail.

Interesseret? Kontakt:

Henrik Westergaard Hansen - henrikwh (at) microsoft.com
Academic Developer Evangelist, Microsoft

Niels Ladegaard Beck - nlbeck (at) daimi.au.dk
Microsoft Student Partner, AU

Mark S. Rasmussen - mark (at) webmentor.dk
Microsoft Student Partner, AU

As some of you already know, the 64 bit version of Vista is now ready for download on MSDNAA. Now you all know :-)

A new version of the Cisco VPN Client is available. This is version 5.0.00.0340 and it seems like it actually works - amazing! :-)

Remember, that on tuesday the 6th of February, Mads Torgersen (my former teacher in Progarmming of Large Systems, dPass) will visit DAIMI.

Mads is now a Program Manager at Microsoft in Redmond, with responsibility for the C# programming language. When he's not out spreading the gospel, he is a core member of the C# design group which currently focuses on the language and library aspects of the LINQ technology. He coordinates and communicates between designers, implementers and testers and with other product groups, and writes too many specifications and other documents for his own good.

Before joining Microsoft, Mads was an associate professor here at DAIMI, the Computer Science Department at Aarhus University, where he worked for four years on programming languages and type systems. The most visible outcome was the wildcards feature in Java generics, which was designed and implemented by Mads and his group at DAIMI.

On tuesday, Mads will be talking about LINQ.

Language Integrated Query in # 3.0 Leave Plumbing to the Plumbers

.NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) unifies querying across programming languages and across data sources. Most application developers work with external data in various formats, such as relational tables or XML documents. Currently, reaching across the gaps of different data representation and different access methodologies is a major challenge in every single application. APIs are often unsafe and error prone, and always specific to the data source.

With LINQ, queries are written directly in your programming language, using the same strong typing and deep tool support as the rest of the application. A uniform querying syntax allows developers to focus on the programming, not the plumbing.

Any data source provider can plug into the LINQ framework. Already in the box are LINQ providers for XML, relational data and in-memory queries. LINQ is API based and can be used from any .NET programming language, but the experience is greatly enhanced by a number of extensions to C# and Visual Basic, many of which have their origins in functional and metaprogramming.

This talk dives deep into the guts of LINQ, focusing on how it brings together many different technologies under the hood to provide a smooth experience on top.

But when and how?

You have to show up on tuesday the 6th of February from 9-11 in "Det store auditorium" in IT-huset.

See you there :-)

If you are studying at DAIMI and running Vista you probably want to connect to the DAIMI network during your daily work. To do this, you need the Cisco VPN client for Vista. You can download the client here: https://www.daimi.au.dk/~staff/VPN/clients-ssl/vpnclient-win-msi-4.8.01.0590-k9.exe

To setup the client, you need the following parameters:
https://www.daimi.au.dk/~staff/VPN/clients-ssl/params.html

In a few days, the DAIMI staff should have a nice guide you can follow, if you can't make it work yourself. The guide will be available here:
http://www.daimi.au.dk/local/system/accessing-the-network/getting-vpn

As the header tells, finally Vista can be found at e-academy.com :-) It has now been available more than a week, but it is first now, it is possible to both do the download of Vista and request a license key at the same place.

So, if you want Vista (which I know you do) and you study at DAIMI, you can download it from the above link. If you have any problems downloading Vista or requesting a key, please contact microsoft *AT* daimi *DOT* au *DOT* dk

What a great day! Nearly 100 Vista Business licenses are now spread all over DAIMI :-) Mark and I had invited the students here at DAIMI to come and hear a little about Vista and Office 2007. Michael Westergaard had brought his Mac on which he installed Vista yesterday. It was great to see, that suddenly a Mac could be useful ;-)

A lot of people dropped by and it got a little crowed when they all wanted to be the first to get a license to Vista. But luckily they all got a copy - Merry Christmas!

If you are studying at DAIMI, are participating in the MSDNAA program and didn’t get a license today – send me an e-mail and I shall see what I can do :-) If, however, you read this after the 11th of December 2006, I expect that Vista is already on MSDNAA.

If you are the lucky owner of a tablet PC, you will love the new character recognition in Windows Vista. In Windows XP the recognition was not that good, but in Vista it's incredible how well it recognizes what you write.

Unfortunately it doesn't work if you set the input language of your computer to Danish :-( So what you can do, is to use the language bar to switch between Danish and English. You can then switch between English and Danish using the good old Alt+Shift shortcut. Then you of course use Danish when you use the keyboard to enter text and English when you use the writing pad in tablet mode. This is not a good solution!

The best solution I know of is a bit strange, but it works very well. What you have to do, is you have to set the input language to English, but the keyboard layout to Danish. So how do you do that? Well, go to the start menu and use the new search box (I never use the "All Programs" anymore - always the search box). Type "regional" and the only item that should appear (at least on a fresh installation) is "Regional and Language Options". So press Enter to get the regional settings dialog. Go to the "Keyboards and Languages" tab and choose "Change keyboards".

So now we have to add English to the list of installed services. Click the "Add..." button. Find "English (United States)" on the list and under "Keyboard" you select "Show More...". Now you must find "Danish" in the list and mark it. Under the main "English (United States)" item you go into "Other" and mark "Ink Correction". Now you are done and can click "OK".

To make it all work well, you select "English (United States) - Danish" in the "Default input language" dropdown and click "Apply". Now it's possible to select "Danish (Denmark)" in the list of installed services and the click "Remove". That's it. Click "OK" and the "Writing Pad" will now work just as you expect it to do :-) But remember, that the "Writing Pad" aren't made for Danish, so it will still use a English dictionary trying to figure out what you mean.

Of course this also work for other languages than Danish. Just do as described above, but replace every occurrence of Danish with the language you want to use when typing on your keyboard.

Hope this helps :-)

Have you ever tried using the famous Equation Editor in Word 2003 and earlier? Then you probably know why many people prefer pen and paper or LaTeX rather than typing in equations in their Word documents.

In Word 2007 Microsoft has made your job as an equation-writer much easier. Go to the Insert tab, click Equation and then Insert New Equation (Alt+n+e+i). You are now in a new and improved version of the old equation editor. You can use the ribbon to enter equations much faster than you could in the old Equation Editor – and it is much easier, due to the ribbons great grouping capabilities.

But wait! There is an even easier way of doing it! The method explained above works great if you only have to enter a single equation or two, but if you have to enter lots of equations the mouse will kill you! So, when you want to write an equation, press Alt+= and now you are in math-mode – much faster than Alt+n+e+i :-) Now you are ready to type in your equation (yes sir, type it in – look mom, no mouse :-D). Let’s take an example.

In the Insert/Equation menu there are several built in equations you can use. We will enter the Binomial Theorem by hand. The first part of it says . So we start the math mode with Alt+= and now we simply type (x+a)^n where ^ means superscript. When we press =, Word will convert our text to a real equation – cool! We now have to enter the second part of the equation:

To get the summation symbol stuff we write \sum_(k=0)^n and press space to make Word convert our text into an equation. \sum is a Math AutoCorrect rule that converts to a summation symbol and _(k=0) makes k=0 a subscript of the summation symbol and as before ^n makes n a superscript. Easy? Yes sir! :-)

For the last part we write (n\atop and press space so Word can convert \atop and then k)x^k and press space again and finally a^(n-k) and space. Now our equation should look like the built in formula:

A pretty nasty equation to construct using the mouse – but pretty simple in Word 2007 :-)

 Unfortunately Microsoft did not put all the \functionname-stuff in the screentips (a new word for the advanced tooltips that is used in Office 2007). So it’s not that easy to learn how to write the equations. But if you have the link to Murray Sargent’s Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics, you will have a very good reference :-)

This feature is fantastic! So good luck with your next equation :-)

Since Office 2007 beta 2 was released I've been using it on my primary computer. And I just love it! The ribbon bar is just great to work with.

Unfortunately Outlook 2007 has started coming with an error telling me, that there are errors in my .pst-file and that I can use scanpst.exe to repair the errors. I've tried using scanpst.exe, but it can't fix the errors :-( The error appears when I try to move particular e-mails from my inbox to a folder. So also if I try to delete the e-mail I get the error (the e-mail must be moved to the "Deleted items" folder). The only thing I can do whith the particular e-mails, is to delete them permanently (Shift+Delete on the keyboard).

My assumption is, that it is Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) Beta 3 that is causing the problem. I have never seen the error before I installed WMDC. If it really is WMDC that is causing the problem, I don't know why it's doing it, because I never synchronize my e-mails with my mobile...

Nice to wake up to this view from our balcony :-S

Why is it, that I just don't want to cycle 4 km to the university, to have two hours of cryptography right now?

Anders Hejlsberg is visiting ITU at the 10th of November. Anders will talk about C# 3.0, including LINQ.

If you aren't attending Tech-Ed - you have no excuse not going to ITU!

You can read more at Henrik W. Hansen's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/henrikwh/archive/2006/10/27/invitation-to-guest-lecture-by-anders-hejlsberg-the-man-behind-delphi-and-c.aspx

I've been running Vista on my Media Center since beta 2 - and I just love it! When Vista RC2 came I finally took the chance and installed it on my precious tablet PC, which are the computer I use at work and at the university. I was a little afraid it would give me a lot of trouble, as beta 2 simply sucked on it (it wasn't beta 2 itself, but the crappy drivers).

Well, I must admit that RC2 is not just a good looking OS, but also a very fast OS. I have 1,5 Gb RAM in my computer, but after installing Vista RC2, it feels like I've upgraded the amount of RAM. My computer is actually a lot faster than it was in XP. I think it's because of better swapping algorihms - but who knows, maybe Microsoft just used their magic wand? :-)

So, everything is fine... except of one small detail! I miss the "Ask me what to do"-option in "Power button and lid settings". When I have my computer in tablet mode, it's very easy for me to press the power button by accident. So - do you know how to get the "Ask me what to do"-button back? Please, ask me what to do...

On Friday I've invited the students from University of Aarhus and Engineering College of Aarhus to Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC) in Vedbæk near Copenhagen. The intention of the visit is to show the students what products Microsoft is developing here in Denmark, how it is to work for Microsoft and of course show them some of the new technologies Microsoft plan to launch within the next few months.

The plan for the day:
Kl. 05.00 We meet at the university in Aarhus and get some breakfast
Kl. 05.30 We jump into the bus, which will take us to Vedbæk
Kl. 10.00 Welcome by Michael Nielsen, Product Unit Manager, Dynamics Tools
Kl. 10.15 Working for Microsoft and life on MDCC campus/ Anja Leschly
Kl. 10.45 Microsoft Imagine Cup/ Henrik Westergaard Hansen (MSDK)
KL.11.05 Mobility/ Niels Bo Theilgaard (added)
Kl. 11.35 Tour of MDCC Campus
Kl. 12.00 Lunch in the café
Kl. 12.45 Demo/presentation of Dynamics AX/ Arvid Nielsen
Kl. 13.15 Demo of Vista & Office 12/ Pau Larsen (MSDK)
Kl. 14.15 Demo/presentation of Dynamics Tools/ Michael Tyrsted
Kl. 15.00 Demo/presentation of Dynamics NAV/ Michael Rosenørn
Kl. 15.30 It's time to go home...
Kl. 20.00 Finally, home again

So far there are 66 people who wants to spend a day at MDCC. We have a few empty seats in the bus, so contact me as soon as possible if you want to join us :-)

Hi, my name is Niels Ladegaard Beck. This is my first post on this brand new site. I'm 26 years old and study computer science at University of Aarhus, Denmark. What I'm going to blog about here probably isn't my studying at the university, but more about my big passion for Microsoft and their products. I'm Microsoft Student Partner at University of Aarhus which means, that I'm telling the students about the wonderful world of Microsoft :-)

In the past month I (and my fellow Student Partners, Mark Rasmussen, Claus Nielsen and Jakob Andersen and Henrik W. Hansen from Microsoft Denmark) have given lectures about ASP.NET 2.0, Atlas, Workflow Foundation, securing .Net code and VSTS. These were given at University of Aarhus, University of Aalborg and Engineering College of Aarhus. I talked about Atlas which I find is a very exciting topic. If you want, you can view my slides and my final demo code (the slides are in Danish - a very-easy-to-learn-language ;-)).

A part of being a Microsoft Student Partner is talking about new technologies. So how do I learn about these new technologies? Well... next week I'm going to Barcelona, Spain, to the Tech-Ed conference :-D Simply can't wait!

Wow! That was my first post - cool :-) Let's see, maybe there will be more than this one some day...